The Foundations of Personality by Abraham Myerson (color ebook reader .TXT) 📕

fluctuates so that now she seems almost “awake” and then she

seems almost in a complete stupor, and that the expression of

emotion in the attack is often very prominent. These symptoms are

readily differentiated from what is seen in epilepsy.[1]

[1] The French writers of the school of Babinski deny that the

above symptom and even the majority of the following have a real

existence in hysteria. The English, American and German

neurologists and the rest of the French school describe hysteria

substantially as I am here describing it.

2. The hysteric paralyses which are featured in all the

literatures of the world are curious manifestations and often

very stubborn. Following an accident (especially in industry and

in war) and after some emotional difficulty there is a paralysis

of some part of the body. The arm or some particular part of the

arm cannot be moved by the will, is paralyzed; or else the

difficulty involves one or both legs. Sometimes speech is gone,

or the power of moving the head; occasionally the difficulty is

with one side of the face, etc. Usually the paralysis comes on

suddenly, but often it comes on gradually. Modern neurology soon

discovered that these paralyses were quite unlike those seen when

there is “real” injury to the brain, spinal cord or the

peripheral nerves. They corresponded to the layman’s idea of a

part. Thus a paralysis of the arm ends at the shoulder, a

paralysis of the feet at the ankle, and in ways not necessary to

detail here differ from what occurs when the organic structure of

the nervous system is involved. For example, the reflexes in

hysteria are unaltered, and stiffness when it occurs is not the

stiffness of organic disease. If a neurologist were to have a

hysteric paralysis a very interesting problem in diagnosis would

be presented.

Further, the paralysis yields in spectacular fashion to various

procedures or else disappears spontaneously in remarkable fashion

overnight. Paralyses of this type have disappeared under

hypnosis, violent electric shocks, “magical” liniments, threats,

prayers, the healer’s, the fakir’s, the doctor’s personal

influence; under circumstances of danger (a fire, a row, etc.);

by pilgrimages to Lourdes, St. Anne de Beaupre, the Temple of

Diana, the relic of a saint; by the influence of sudden joy,

fear, anger; by the work of the psychoanalyst and by that of the

osteopath! Every great religious leader and every savage medicine

man beating a tom-tom has had to, prove his pretensions to

greatness by healing the sick—so intensely practical is man—and

he has proved his divinity by curing the hysterics, so that they

threw away their crutches, or jumped blithely out of bed, or used

their arms, perhaps for the first time in years. Hysteria has

caused more talk of the influence of mind over body than all

other manifestations of mental peculiarity put together. Wherever

there is anything to be gained by hysteric paralyses, these

appear in much greater frequency than under ordinary

circumstances. Thus the possibility of recovering damages seems

to play a role in bringing about a paralysis that defies

treatment until the litigation is settled; similarly the

possibility of being removed from the fighting line played a

large part in the causation of war hysteric paralysis.

3. A group of sensory phenomena is conspicuous in hysteria,

sometimes combined with the paralyses and attacks but often

existing alone. A part of the body will become curiously

insensitive to stimulation. Thus one may thrust a pin into any

part without evoking any pain and APPARENTLY without being felt;

one may rub the cornea of the eye, that exquisitely sensitive

part, without arousing a reaction; one may push a throat stick

against the uvula as it hangs from the palate without arousing

the normal and very lively reflex of “gagging.” These insensitive

areas, known as stigmata, played a very important role in the

epidemic of witchcraft hunting of the sixteenth and seventeenth

centuries, when the witch was so diagnosed if she felt no pain

when a needle was thrust into her. Mankind has often enough

worshiped the insane and mentally aberrant and has as often been

diabolically cruel to them.

What has been stated of the paralyses is true of the insensitive

areas; they correspond to an idea of a part and not to an

anatomical unit. Thus a loss of sensation will reach up to the

wrist (glove type) all around, front and back, or to the elbow or

the shoulder, etc. No organically caused anaesthetic area ever

does this, and so the neurologist is able, usually, to separate

the two conditions. And the anaesthesias yield as do the hysteric

paralyses to a variety of agents, from prayer and persuasion to a

bitter tonic or a blow. I confess to a weird feeling in the

presence of a hysteric whose arm can be thrust through and

through with a needle without apparently suffering any pain, and

it seems to me that this may be the explanation of the fortitude

of those martyrs who have astonished and sometimes converted

their persecutors by their sublime resistance to torture.

There has been described as part of hysteria the hysteric

temperament. The characteristics of this temperament are the

emotional instability, the strong desire for sympathy, the effort

to obtain one’s desire through weakness, through the appeal to

the sympathy of others, an irritable egoism never satisfied and

without firm purpose. It is true that the majority of peace-time

hysterics show this peculiar temperament, but it is also true

that the war-time hysterics often enough were of “normal”

character, without prior evidence of weakness.

As I before mentioned, Freud became greatly interested in this

group of patients and especially in the female patients, since in

ordinary neurological practice the male hysteric is not common.

Out of his experience and effort he built up a system of beliefs

and treatment, the evolution of which is interesting, but which

is not here important.

At the present time the Freudian doctrine hangs on the following

beliefs:

1. That from the beginning to the end of life everything in the

mental activities of man has a cause and a meaning, and that

these causes and meanings may be traced back to infancy. No slip

of the tongue is accidental; it has purpose and this purpose can

be traced by psychoanalysis. So with hysteric phenomena: the

paralyses, the sensory changes, all the queer and startling

things represent something of importance and of value to the

subconscious.

2. There is in man a subconscious mentality, having wills,

purposes, strivings, desires, passions. These trends are the raw,

native, uninhibited desires of man; they are our lusts, our crude

unsocialized desires, arising out of a metaphysical,

undifferentiated yearning called libido. In the Freudian

“psychology” the libido is mainly sex desire and takes the form

of homosexual feelings, incest feelings (desire for the father or

for the mother—the oedipus complex), desire for the sister or

brother.[1] (The human being, according to Freud, goes through

three stages in his sex life: first, a sex attachment to himself

marked by thumb sucking, masturbation, etc., second, an

attachment to the same sex—homosexuality—and, finally, the

attachment or desire for the opposite sex.) In the practical

application of the Freudian psychology to the patients the sex

conflicts (of which we shall speak shortly) are all important;

the subconsciousness is largely taken up with sex and with

efforts to obtain gratification for these sex desires.

[1] The Freudians would protest against this. Libido is the life

energy,—but all the Freudian analyses of actual cases published

make libido sex, and usually “perverse.” (I put the perverse in

quotations because I fear to be called prudish by Freudians.)

3. But, the theory continues, the conscious personality is the

socialized personality, having aims and ends not consistent with

desire for mother, homosexual cravings, lust for a married man or

woman. So there ensues a battle between desire and inhibition.

The inhibiting agent is a something called the censor, who pushes

back into the subconsciousness the socially tabooed, the socially

abhorrent desires; represses emotions and instincts that are

socially out of order. But there is no real victory for the

consciousness, for the complex (the name given to a desire or

wish with its attendant ideas, emotions and motor manifestations)

is still active, subconsciously changing the life of the person,

causing him to make slips in his speech, expressing itself in his

dreams and his work, and if sufficiently powerful, giving rise to

nervous or mental disease of one type or another. Nothing is ever

forgotten, according to Freud, and the reason our childhood is

not voluntarily remembered is because it is full of forbidden

desires and curiosities and the developing censor thrusts it all

into the subconsciousness, where it continues to make trouble all

the rest of the individual’s life. In fact, a cardinal part of

Freudianism (which he and his followers are lately modifying) is

that it is the results of the “psychic traumata” (psychical

injuries) of infancy and childhood that cause the hysteria of the

adult; and these psychical traumata are largely (about ninety-nine per cent.) sexual.

4. Freudianism has borrowed the time-honored dictum that every

sensation has a natural result in action and has elaborated it

into the statement that every affective state, every desire and

craving of whatever sort, needs a motor discharge, an avenue of

outlet. If the desire or emotion is inhibited, its excitement is

transferred with it into the subconscious and that excitement may

attach itself to other excitements and break into consciousness

as a mental disturbance of one type or another. If you can get at

the complex by psychoanalysis, by dragging it to the light, by

making it conscious, you discharge the excitement and health is

restored. This originally was very important in the Freudian work

and was called by the crude term of catharsis.

5. How can one get at these subterranean cravings and strivings,

at the fact that originally one desired one’s mother and was

jealous of one’s father, or vice versa? Here Freud developed an

elaborate technique based on the following:

Though the censor sits on the lid of the subconsciousness, that

wily self has ways and means of expression. In dreams, in humor,

in the slip of the tongue, in forgetfulness, in myths of the

race, in the symptoms of the hysteric patient, in the creations

of writers and artists, the subconsciousness seeks to symbolize

in innocent (or acceptable) form its crude wishes. By taking a

dream, for example, and analyzing it by what is known as the free

association method, one discovers the real meaning of the terms

used, the meaning behind the symbol; and behind the apparent

dream-content one sees revealed the wishes and disorganizing

desires of the subconscious or the real person. For throughout

Freud’s work, though not so definitely expressed, there is the

idea that the subconscious is by far the most important part of

the personality, and that the social purposes, the moral

injunctions and feelings are not the real purposes and real

desires of the real personality.

In analyzing dreams, the symbols become quite standardized. The

horses, dogs, beards, queer situations of the dream (falling,

walking without clothes, picking up money, etc.), the demons,

ghosts, flying, relate definitely to sex situations, sex organs,

sex desires. (The Freudians are apt to deny this theoretically,

but practically every dream of the thousands they publish is a

sex dream of crude content.) Naturally a “pure” girl is quite

shocked when told that because she dreamed she was riding a gray

horse in a green meadow that she really has bad (and still is

troubled by) incestuous desires for her father, but that is the

way to cure her of her neurasthenia or fatigue or obsession of

one kind or other.

I have not attempted a detailed account of the